A commentary on digital photography news and practice based on my ongoing photo magazine coverage of the industry and photographer community since 1975.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

WINDOWS WATCHERS

Windows 7 is now public in a pre-beta edition that was made available to the press. After the Vista imbroglio that has gone on since its release with endless negativity towards Microsoft, that they had to recant and offer a new version is not unexpected at such an early date, and they have been candidly contrite in admitting Vista has not been well received, which was confirmed by Microsoft naming the next version Windows 7 dropping the Vista brand, and hoping this edition number will bring them luck.

There was only a sideways acknowledgement that the User Account Control of intrusive pop-up security alert window is an annoyance, but not that it also disables a calibrated and profiled displays start-up status, which destroys color management functioning. But in Windows 7 the intrusion can be turned off completely and apparently without affecting system security. But the pre-beta watchers had nothing to say about color management, which was again a disappointment in a lack of hyped promised new version implementation in Vista as it was with Windows 2000, so there is no insight yet whether Windows will have anything better in Color Management than the current ICM 2.0 from the mid 1990's.

The only reference to anything even vaguely relative to digital photography was a hint that it and other media support in Windows 7 may very likely be downloadable Windows Live web-based applications. Whether that will be an advantage or disadvantage is not clear as no one has really tried to work with anything like that, but a hint of it came from Adobe recently in their new web-based application recently launched that is so dumbed-down it is even insulting to novice photographers and is really only supportive of the least of people who make point and shoot snapshots. So there is a real question if there will be even sufficient support of serious digital photography except through 3rd party applications like Adobe's, and whether they will work any better or even as well a they have performed on XP.

The same day most of the information I read on Windows 7 on PC Magazine's web site and the ZDnet web site, their premier blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes had a speculative piece "How long until Apple is bigger than Microsoft" which had some rather startling statistics to the effect Microsoft revenue at $15.1 billion is not all that far ahead of Apple at $11.7 billion, and Apple is ahead with cash on hand at $25.5 billion compared to Microsoft's $20.7 billion.

This of course leads to all kinds of fun speculation to heat up the ancient and worn thin PC vs Mac rivalries. But there is now after Vista some questions that maybe Apple 's concept and business model is a superior one to Microsoft's, especially if you consider Apple has a very much better customer satisfaction record. But there is still the problem that once committed, computer users no matter how disappointed will not admit they made a bad choice any more than they will admit any of their political beliefs are wrong, so there will be no stampede to Apple Macs for now, even if Windows 7 doesn't lessens the pains of Vista.